These days, surrealism is well-established as a basis for comedy. You don’t even have to get laughs if you can twist what passes for reality in a uniquely enjoyable way. It wasn’t always so.
In the 1940s and 1950s, comedic premises were fairly square and straightforward. People did jokes and sketches and then played music or sold war bonds or whatever. There were cartoons and the Three Stooges, but those were widely seen as being for kids.
Then in 1946, two announcers found themselves on the radio together in Boston, Massachusetts, and American comedy began to change.
Bob Elliott played records and did interviews. Ray Goulding read the news. At WHDH, a sleepy AM station best known at the time for providing pricing updates for fishermen (its call letters, it was said, stood for “We Handle Dead Haddock”), the two otherwise staid men discovered a zany-if-buttoned-down chemistry while filling time.
In his account of their career, David Pollock describes their relatively quick trajectory from station-break non-sequiturs into full-out zaniness, performing often-impromptu sketches that toyed with standard radio conventions while also being uniquely funny:
A sound effect of a howling dog in an episode of Jack Headstrong, All-American American might reflexively trigger Bob to pivot into his Basil Rathbone voice, which, in turn, would launch Ray into his Nigel Bruce, and suddenly they would be off on a Sherlock Holmes jag. That a sketch would suddenly be aborted never violated the integrity of the piece because it had no integrity. It was a lark, a fanciful tangent. By mocking the subject’s pretensions, Bob and Ray, themselves so unpretentious, made it inherently comical.
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| Ray Goulding (at left) and Bob Elliott in their early days together at WHDH. Writes Pollock: "If you wanted baseball in Boston in 1947, you had to tune to 850 and WHDH,
where fans also stumbled into Elliott and Goulding and their freeform parodies,
voices, dialects, and crudely fashioned, live sound effects." Image from https://www.radiohalloffame.com/bob-and-ray |
During a four-decades-and-change-long career, Bob and Ray moved from station to station, from radio to television and back to radio, winning over movers and shakers while only intermittently engaging the rest of America. They were legends without being stars.
Pollock’s book attempts to explain this disconnect, and occasionally succeeds. Much of it had to do with Bob and Ray themselves. They were not comedians in the vein of Laurel and Hardy, with a gift for acting funny or telling jokes. They wore jackets and ties and comported themselves like bank presidents on and off the air. Occasionally they played practical jokes on other radio-station employees, but cutting up was not their style.
When they made the transition to television in 1951, Pollock writes, the formula remained the same, even though the stakes were higher:
Just as on radio, the boys projected barely heightened on-air personas. They were easy company. They did not pander to or force themselves on the audience, nor did they come across as professional nice guys, or traffic in showbiz schmaltz. They effectively distinguished themselves by appearing normal.
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| Bob and Ray's network television debut on July 2, 1951 saw them introduce themselves in beekeeper costumes, in a sketch that according to Pollock also allowed them to adjust to a new medium without overtaxing their facial expressions. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03TsQcKhs3g |
Pollock’s book does best when he sticks with the pair’s material. There was Mary McGoon, a character falsetto-voiced by Ray who sang “I Want To Be A Cow In Switzerland” and explained how to make frozen ginger-ale salad. Bob’s roving reporter, Wally Ballou, introduced the possessor of the world’s most beautiful face, who explains he always walks with his back to the wind. Ray’s Webley Webster introduced book reviews which somehow always morphed into pirate stories featuring the easily-angered Wolf Larsen, pummeling Bob as his hapless lackey.
Ray: “I’ll teach ye to keep a civil tongue in ye head!”
[Thudding sound effect] Bob: “D’oh!”
There were soap operas; mystery shows; a presidential impersonator of pre-televised presidents like James Polk; sports interviews (e. g. a champion low jumper explaining how he survived 60-foot falls); and special offers, like chocolate rabbits improperly stored next to steam pipes, now being sold as “wobblies.”
Pollock explains:
Bob and Ray appealed to all demographics; however, like Mad [magazine], they uniquely resonated with one cultural subset in particular: smart, clever, perhaps disaffected – mostly male – adolescents of the era. For this bunch, Bob and Ray’s off-center cosmos was especially seductive.
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| On television, Ray could no longer play all the female parts in a high voice. A woman was needed to act on-air with the boys. The first of these was Audrey Meadows, pre-"Honeymooners." Her ability to bite into any comic premise won Bob and Ray over. Image from https://www.facebook.com/bobandray/photos |
How did they come up with all this stuff? Here, Pollock doesn’t do as well, though I think he suffers from the fact Ray had been gone some 20 years and Bob, though alive and cooperative, seemed reticent in the quotes here. It is frustrating to read time and again of their “shared comic brain,” as Bob Newhart terms it in an interview with the author, without getting a deeper look inside that brain and how it worked.
There are some exceptions. Bob reveals how he came up with one of their most memorable bits, a clueless interviewer interviewing a dull Komodo dragon expert in what amounts to a hilariously circular exchange, after listening to an actual radio program that went about the same way. Ray’s real-life personality was apparently the impetus for his mercurial Wolf Larson, switching back and forth from fist-slinging bully to amiable buddy with hilarious abruptness. Ray was no bully, but he could be surprisingly gruff and combative on occasion.
This was a source of friction with several collaborators, namely writers who frequently provided the pair with material and often went without credit, whom Pollock identifies here.
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| Bob and Ray as they appeared in Mad magazine in 1959, cartoonist Mort Drucker providing the art. One odd thing about this bit is seeing their most famous character, Wally Ballou, with his last name spelled "Ballew." Probably an outcome of using an outside writer. Image from https://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2016/02/03/rip-bob-elliott-comedian |
Ray is recalled as “bombastic” if pleasant company, with strongly liberal political views he kept out of his comedy. Bob was shy, invariably reserved, and always deferential to his partner’s wishes. Off-work, the pair spent little time together, occupying different social circles. A former business partner, Ed Graham, is quoted on this point:
“Each of them could make the other laugh so hard that continuing a studio session was pointless. So it seemed strange to me that each of them could just get up and leave every day without even a goodbye to each other. Now that the years have passed, I realize that may have been one of their many strokes of genius.”
Graham helped Bob and Ray find a new audience, and a second career, in the 1950s by landing them work as the voices of Bert and Harry Piel, animated characters who sold Piels beer. The immediate success of this campaign sold Madison Avenue on humor as a vehicle for advertising, and not incidentally kept Bob and Ray in the public eye.
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| An animated cel showing Bert (at left) and Harry Piel, voiced by Ray and Bob respectively. So popular were the commercials for Piels Beer that air times for their spots were listed in some television guides. Image from https://comics.ha.com/itm/animation-art/production-cel/piels-beer-commercial-production-cel-set-up-and-background-1960s-/a/7086-96615.s |
This was no small thing, as the pair never enjoyed a long-term gig in broadcasting. Pollock catches stints they did at national networks and a number of local stations around New York City. For years they performed sketches on NBC Monitor, a weekend-long radio program which required the pair to sit around working crossword puzzles waiting for their next three minutes at the microphone. That image of them so tragically underused in their prime is hard to shake.
Pollock plays up the spotlight moments, which happened much less often after the 1950s, their golden age. Some hardly merit notice, like a spot voicing characters for an animated Christmas special. But Pollock does score by starting his book focused on Bob and Ray’s 1970 Broadway opening of “The Two And Only,” a stage performance which consisted of just them sitting in chairs, doing old sketches. It was a huge hit, reintroducing the pair to another generation.
A tedious sidebar of the book is Pollock’s name-dropping, mentioning every celebrity however glancing their acquaintance with the pair. Producer Joe Cates, who oversaw a short-lived NBC variety show, “Club Embassy,” featuring Bob and Ray, is “father of Phoebe,” while Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who auditioned unsuccessfully for a radio commercial Bob and Ray were producing, are “parents of Ben Stiller.” It gets like a Who’s Who of yesterday’s stars after a while.
Bob has his own famous offspring, most immediately Chris Elliott, who unlike his father seems willing here to share some personal insights with the author. Ray’s family is even more unguarded, a plus as his deadly battles with kidney disease and his fearsome reputation for grouchiness infuse the book with some desperately needed heart.
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| In 1984, Bob and Ray performed two shows of selected sketches at Carnegie Hall. Ray was undergoing dialysis treatment for his failing kidneys but he and Bob managed to win over the enthusiastic Manhattan audiences with ease. "I suppose each new generation notices we are there," Ray said at the time. Image from https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article/is-humor-the-secret-to-rhinegeists-success/ |
Otherwise, the book sags a quarter of the way in, after colorfully detailing the pair’s early rise at the backwaters of WHDH and explaining just how much of a change they were from the standard light-comedy entertainers of the era:
By network radio’s comedy conventions of the day, Bob and Ray were game-changers. Without a studio audience present, it fell to the listener to determine what was funny. It was being let in on one big private joke between these two new, often overlapping voices, which suddenly could become three, four, and five voices, all bouncing off one another from every direction. It was like entering a house of mirrors for the ears.
Pollock’s decision to focus more on their indirect cultural influence on more famous celebrities is understandable – you can’t tout Nielsen ratings or box-office returns when you are talking about Bob and Ray – but a better approach would have trimmed the plaudits and plugs and focused on untangling their work history, admittedly no easy task.
You
do get a taste of their comedy, if in the form of one-liners rather than longer
dialogues, where their wit and charm truly blossomed. But beggars can’t be
choosers, and Bob and Ray fans are decently served by this solid, focused
effort at capturing what it was that made them special.
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